were received to when a final printed and
casted model was ready to ship.

Dr. Abdulrauf and his team used the
3D printed models to plan surgical procedures and then actually rehearse them
using the same types of instruments and
equipment they would be using on the
live patient. The initial results from these
early trials have been very promising.

“I’ve done a lot of aneurysm opera-tions in my career and I can confidentlysay that having the 3D printed modelhere has a very positive impact on theprocedure results,” Dr. Abdulrauf stated.“The model has helped to identify andovercome surgical challenges, like opti-mum access to the aneurysm or the depthand angle of the approach, before surgerybegins.”The trails also provided valuableinformation that will help make the nextgeneration of surgical models even moreuseful. For example, Dr. Abdulrauf toldMedical Device Technology that theworking feels of the printed materialscame close to that of actual tissue, buttheir surface texture did not provide accu-rate haptic feedback through the surgicalinstruments. He said that that one of thegoals of the next phase of developmentwill be to work on materials with morerealistic textures.

Now that these preliminary experiments have yielded positive results, the
next move is to measure the success of
3D printed models through a pair of blind
studies that Dr. Abdulrauf has proposed.
In the first study, resident neurosurgeons
will be asked to perform a procedure on a
cadaver. Half of the residents will prepare
for the surgery using a 3D printed model
of the cadaver’s while the other half will
prepare for the surgery in the conventional manner. The performance of the
two groups will be compared in a blind
study by a team of assessors who will
not know which group received the 3D
printed model. Success will be measured
by the duration of the procedure, absence
of errors, and how well the surgical teams
are able to keep the circumference of the
surgery as small as possible and minimize
disturbances to adjacent healthy tissue.

A second study will compare the out-comes of two groups of patients receivingsimilar operations and a similar standardof care. The only difference will be thatthe neurosurgeons in one group will re-ceive a 3D printed model of their brain topractice on prior to surgery. Both groupswill be assessed on the basis of patientrecovery time and overall patient comfortpost-surgery. Once the studies are funded,Dr. Abdulrauf hopes to gain deeper, morequantified insights into the how 3D print-ing can positively impact the outcome ofsurgical procedures. MDT